If Angels Fight (15 page)

Their son, Timothy, was not three and their daughter Helen was just born when Robert Macauley sailed from San Francisco on the aircraft carrier
Constellation
. Julia saw him off, then found herself part of the great, shifting mass of soldiers and sailors home on leave, women returning after saying goodbye to husbands, sons, boyfriends.

On a crowded train, with sailors sleeping in the luggage racks, she and a Filipino nurse cried about their men in the South Pacific. She talked with a woman, barely forty, who had four sons in the army.

Julia felt lost and empty. She reread the
Metamorphoses
and
The Odyssey
and thought a lot about Alcier and the Still Room. It had been two years since she had visited Mount Airey. She felt herself drawn there all that winter.

Early in spring, she left her children in the care of nurses and her grandmother and went by train from New York to Boston and from Boston to Bangor. She arrived in the morning and Mr. Eder met her at the station. They drove past houses with victory gardens and V’s in the windows if family members were in the service.

A sentry post had been established on the mainland end of Wenlock Sound Bridge. The Army Signal Corps had taken over Bachelors’ Point for the duration of the war.

The bar at Baxter’s was an officers’ club. On Olympia Drive, some of the great houses had been taken for the duration. Staff cars, jeeps, canvas-topped trucks, stood in the circular drives.

It was just after the thaw. Joyous Garde stood empty. Patches of snow survived on shady corners of the terraces. The statues looked as if they still regretted their lack of clothes.

Julia found a pair of rubber boots that fit and set off immediately for Stoneham Cabin. In summer, Mt. Airey was nature in harness, all bicycle paths and hiking parties. In Mud Time, dry beds ran with icy water, flights of birds decorated a gray sky, lake-sized puddles had appeared, the slopes lay leafless and open.

Julia saw the stranger as she approached the cabin. But this was her land and she did not hesitate. Sallow faced, clean-shaven with the shadow of a beard, he was expecting her. When she stepped onto the porch, he came to attention. She knew that sometime in the recent past he had murdered Alcier.

“Corporal John Smalley, Her Britannic Majesty’s London Fusiliers,” he said. “Anxious to serve you, my lady.”

In the Still Room, when they entered, Julia looked around, saw wreckage in the desert shrine, smashed tanks on the sand. Dead animals lay around the oasis, and she guessed the water was poisoned.

The murderer put on the silver mask and spoke. His voice rang. Julia felt a chill.

“It’s by the will of the gods that I’m here today. By way of a nasty scrap in the hills. Caught dead to rights and every one of us to die. Officers down. No great moment. But the sergeant major was gone. A spent round richoted off my Worsley helmet and I was on me back looking up.

“I lay still but I could hear screams and thought it was up and done with and I would dance on hot coals for as long as it took. For cheating and philandering and the cove I stabbed in Cheapside. And I prayed as I’d never done.

“Then He appeared. Old Jehovah as I thought, all fiery eyes and smoke behind his head. Then He spoke and it seems it was Mars himself. I noticed he wore a helmet and carried a flaming sword. He told me I was under His protection and nothing would happen to me.

“Good as His word. No one saw when I rose up and took my Enfield. He lead the way all through the night, talking in my ear. About the shrine and the priest that lives here.

“A runaway slave it always is who kills the old priest and takes over. And I choked at that. Not the killing, but Britains never will be slaves and all.

“Lord Mars told me enlistment in Her Majesty’s Army came close enough. New thinking, new blood was what was needed. Led me to a hill shrine before dawn. Left me to my own devices.

“The shrine’s that one through that portal behind your ladyship. A grove with the trees all cut short by the wind and a circle of stone and a deep pool. When I was past the circle and beside the pool, the wind’s sound was cut off and it was dead still.

“A path led down to the pool and on it was a couple of stones and a twig resting on them. And I knew not to disturb that. So I went to ground. Oiled my Enfield. Waited. Took a day or two. But I was patient. Ate my iron rations and drank water from the pool.

“When he came, it was at dusk and he knew something was up. A formidable old bugger he was. But . . .”

He trailed off. Removed the mask. “You knew him. Since you were a little girl, I hear.”

Julia’s eyes burned. “He had a wife and children.”

“I’ve kept them safe. He’d put a sum aside for them from shrine offerings and I saw they had that. Got my own bit of bother and strife tucked away. We know in this job we aren’t the first. And won’t be the last. Living on a loan of time so to speak.”

He pointed to the ruined shrines. “The gods have gotten wise that things will not always go their way.”

The corporal told her about defense works and traps he was building. Like a tenant telling the landlady about improvements he is making, thought Julia. She knew that was the way it would be between them and that she would always miss her noble Alcier.

Just before she left, Smalley asked, “I wonder if I could see your son, m’lady. Sometime when it’s convenient.”

Julia said nothing. She visited her grandmother, eighty and erect, living in Taos in a spare and beautiful house. Her companion was a woman from the Pueblo, small, silent and observant.

“Timothy is the whole point of our involvement,” said the old woman. She sat at a table covered with breeding charts and photos of colts. “You and I are the precursors.”

“He’s just a child.”

“As were you when you were taken to the shrine. Think of how you loved Alcier. He would have wanted you to do this. And you shall have your rewards. Just as I have.”

“And they are?”

“At this point in your life, you would despise them if I told you. In time, they will seem more than sufficient.”

Julia knew that she would do as the Rex had asked. But that summer Robert was stationed in Hawaii. So she went out to be with him instead of going to Mount Airey. The next August, she gave birth to Cecilia, her second daughter.

The year after that, Robert was in a naval hospital in California, injured in a crash landing on a carrier flight deck. His shoulder was smashed but healed nicely. A three inch gash ran from his left ear to his jaw. It threw his smile slightly off-kilter.

He seemed distant, even in bed. Tempered like a knife. And daring. As if he too sensed death and destiny and the will of the gods.

When the war was over Robert had a Navy Cross, a trademark smile and a scar worth, as he put it, “Fifty-thousand votes while they still remember.”

Over his own father’s objections, the young Macauley ran for congress from the West Side of Manhattan. The incumbent, one of the old man’s allies, was enmeshed in a corruption scandal. Robert won the primary and the election. His lovely wife and three young children were features of his campaign.

Julia paid a couple of fast visits to the cabin. On one of them the Corporal told her, “I know it’s a kid will be my undoing. But it will be a little girl.” On another he said, “The gods would take it as a great favor, if you let me speak to your son.”

Thus it was that one lovely morning the following summer, Julia left her two little daughters in the huge nursery at Joyous Garde and brought Timothy to Stoneham Cabin. As if it was part of a ritual, she had Mrs. Eder pack lunch.

Julia stuck a carton of the Luckies she knew the Corporal favored into the basket and started up the hill. Her son, age seven and startlingly like the father he rarely saw, darted around, firing a toy gun at imaginary enemies.

The corporal, tanned and wiry, sat on the back porch, smoking and cleaning his rifle. Tim stared at him wide-eyed. “Are you a commando?” he asked after the introductions were made and he’d learned that their guest was English.

“Them’s Navy,” Smalley said. “And I’m a soldier of the Queen. Or King as it is.”

Julia stared down at Mirror Lake. Except when Smalley spoke, she could imagine that Alcier was still there.

Something even more intense than this must have happened to her grandmother after the death of Ki Mien.

“Have you killed anybody?”

“Killing’s never a nice thing, lad. Sometimes a necessity. But never nice,” Smalley said. “Now what do you say that we ask your mother if I can show you around?”

Later, on their way back to the cottage, Timothy was awestruck. “He showed me traps he had set! In a jungle! He told me I was going to be a great leader!”

As her grandmother had with her, Julia demanded his silence. Timothy agreed and kept his word. In fact, he rarely mentioned the cabin and the shrine. Julia wondered if Smalley had warned him not to. Then and later, she was struck by how easily her son accepted being the chosen of the gods.

Fashion had passed Mt. Airey by. That summer, the aging bucks at Bachelors’ Point drawled on about how Dewey was about to thrash Truman. And how the Rockefellers had donated their estate to the National Parks Service.

“What else now that the Irish have gotten onto the island.”

“And not even through the back door.”

That summer, Helen Stoneham Garde stayed in New Mexico. But Joyous Garde jumped. “Prominent Democrats from the four corners of the nation come to be bedazzled,” as Congressman Macauley murmured to his wife.

Labor leaders smoked cigars in the oak and leather splendor of Simon Garde’s study. Glowing young Prairie Populists drank with entrenched Carolina Dixiecrats. The talk swirled around money and influence, around next year’s national elections and Joe Kennedy’s boy down in Massachusetts.

Above them, young Macauley with his lovely wife stood on the curve of the pink and marble stairs. Julia had grown interested in this game. It reminded her of her grandmother’s breeding charts and race horses.

The following summer, Helen Stoneham Garde returned to her estate. Afternoons at Baxter’s were drowsy now and dowager-ridden.

“Carried in a litter like royalty.”

“Up the mountain to the cabin.”

“Returned there to die it seems.”

“Her daughter and son-in-law will have everything.” Shudders ran around the room.

On an afternoon of warm August sun and a gentle sea breeze, Julia sat opposite her grandmother on the back porch of Stoneham Cabin. “Only the rich can keep fragments of the past alive,” Helen told her. “To the uneducated eye, great wealth can be mistaken for magic.”

Below them, a party had picnicked next to Mirror Lake a bit earlier. Hikers had passed though. But at the moment, the shore was deserted, the surface undisturbed. The Rex was not in evidence.

Helen’s eye remained penetrating, her speech clear. “A peaceful death,” she said, “is one of the gifts of the gods.”

Julia wished she had thought to ask her grandmother more questions about how their lives had been altered by the shrine. She realized that her own introduction to it at so young an age had occurred because Helen could not stand dealing with the man who had murdered the one closest to her.

The two sat in a long silence. Then the old woman said, “My dearest child, I thought these might be of interest,” and indicated a leather folder on the table.

Julia opened it and found several photos. She stared, amazed at the tree-lined Cambridge Street and the young couple agape at their first glimpse of each other. She couldn’t take in all the details at once: the deliveryman hopping from his cart, the elderly gent out for a stroll, the boy who walked slightly behind what must have been his parents.

Small, perhaps foreign in his sandals, he alone saw the tall, dark- haired young man, the tall blond young woman, stare at each other in wonder.

“You knew before . . .” Julia said looking up. She didn’t dare breathe. Her grandmother still smiled slightly. Her eyes were wide. Beside her stood a figure in a silver mask. Tall and graceful. Not Corporal Smalley. Not at all. He wore only a winged helmet and sandals. Hermes, Lord Mercury, touched Helen with the silver caduceus staff he carried.

Julia caught her breath. Her grandmother slumped slightly. Helen Stoneham Garde’s eyes were blank. Her life was over. The figure was gone.

5.

“First day of Autumn,” Martha Eder said when Julia came down the Old Cottage stairs the morning after her return. A picnic basket had been packed. Julia had not brought cigarettes for Smalley, had reason to think they weren’t necessary.

The air was crisp but the sun was warm enough that all Julia needed was a light jacket. As she set out, Henry Eder interrupted his repair of a window frame. “I can go with you, see if anything needs doing.” When she declined, he nodded and went back to his work.

Grief was a private matter to Mainers. Besides, even after three quarters of a century, Julia’s family were still “summer folk,” and thus unfathomable.

The walk up Mount Airey was magnificent. Julia had rarely seen it this late in the year. Red and gold leaves framed green pine. Activity in the trees and undergrowth was almost frantic. A fox, intent on the hunt, crossed her path.

After her grandmother’s death, she had returned to the cabin only on the occasions when she brought Tim. In the last few years, she hadn’t been back at all.

She remembered a day when she and Robert sat in the study of their Georgetown mansion and Timothy knocked on the door. Just shy of twelve, he wore his Saint Anthony’s Priory uniform of blazer and short pants. In 1951, the American upper class kept its boys in shorts for as long as possible. A subtle means of segregating them from the masses.

Representative Robert Macauley, (D-NY), was maneuvering for a Senate nomination in what promised to be a tough year for Democrats. He looked up from the speech he was reviewing. Julia, busy with a guest list, watched them both.

Timothy said, “What I would like for my birthday this year is a crewcut. Lots of the kids have them. And I want long pants when I’m not in this stupid monkey suit. And this summer I want to be allowed to go up to the cabin on Mount Airey by myself.”